1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to: a method; a computer program; a computer program product; and an apparatus; all for selecting a user network usage policy, and in particular for selecting a user policy to use with a particular application session.
2. Related Art
The mapping of application sessions to user policies is a very important requirement for both present and future Internet technologies such as Quality of Service (QoS) provision, usage control and QoS control. At the present time, there is no direct way for users to control their Internet traffic behaviour, behaviour such as transmission rate and aggressiveness. Instead, users rely on TCP, UDP and other closed loop transport layer control protocols to control the traffic on their behalf.
Nowadays, users use the Internet for several different things at a time, for instance, downloading articles from a newsgroup and having a voice-chat with her friends in a chat room. In spite of both applications are using the same network connection, they have different network resource requirements such as bandwidth and delay. At the moment, using TCP, both applications will have to fight against each other to get the network resources they need.
In a dynamic pricing scenario (such as, for example, that being considered by the M3I Consortium (see www.m3i.org)) an agent can be set up to help the user to react to dynamic pricing signals. It requires the user to specify a control policy, usually represented as the user utility. As the user may have different preferences to each application task, so a different control policy is applied to them. Clearly, if the agent doesn't have a policy input, it will not be able to react to the dynamic price.
According to present research in advanced Internet technology, what is still missing in order to address the above problem is the bonding of Internet traffic flows, application sessions and user policies. Solutions which partially address this problem are starting to appear, and in particular our own earlier co-pending European Patent Application No 02251983.9 discloses a system to map data traffic flows with application sessions. This solves part of the problem in that it allows data flows generated by application sessions to be identified and mapped thereto, but what is still missing is the additional step of then mapping an application session to a user network usage policy, which contains information on, for example, how the user wishes to respond to different network prices, whether different types of data should be given a higher priority (and hence paid for at a higher charge for network transport thereof), how the system should respond to dynamic pricing signals received from the network, etc. etc. As will be apparent from the foregoing, the proper mapping of user usage policies to applications sessions is essential for dynamic internet charging scenarios.
The application session to user policy mapping problem has been considered before, but problems arise with previous solutions in that they are not particularly flexible. An example is where a user's preference is hardwired to the system. In this case the system has a pre-programmed user's preference set in the system, and hence the preference may not truly represent what the user wants at all times or for each different type of network application. An example of this is where a default user policy is provided to the user by the user's Internet Service Provider for use with all network applications.
In another known solution, the user has to select his/her utility before the start of a session (e.g. in most M3I scenarios). However, to keep asking a user what they want for every application session which is launched is not a practical solution, as it wastes time and furthermore tends to cater only for the needs of expert users who know the significance of the options available. For an average lay user of networks such as the Internet, the specific tuning required by this solution upon the launching of each and every network application session is not a viable option, and both expensive mistakes may be made by inexperienced users who select a high utility for data (indicating that they would be willing to pay a high price for its transport over the network) for which in reality the user has only a relatively low utility.